Fearing G.I. Occupiers, Japan Urgesd Women Into Brothels

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Governments have made plenty of outrageous requests of their citizens, but few are as remarkable as what the Japanese Government secretly requested of tens of thousands of Japanese women 50 years ago.

Six days after Japan's surrender in World War II, the Cabinet met in the Prime Minister's residence to discuss "urgent measures" that had nothing to do with the atomic bombings or the millions of homeless people or similar national crises. Instead, the Cabinet struggled with how to sate the libido of American "sex-starved soldiers."

Fearing that the Americans occupying Japan would behave as Japanese troops sometimes had overseas, raping any woman in sight, the Government quietly set up a front organization to establish brothels, and asked patriotic Japanese women to sacrifice themselves as "comfort women" for the Americans.

"We were told that our mission was to be a sexual dike to protect the chastity of Japanese women," remembers Tatsugoro Suzuki, who was then the 25-year-old manager of a fine restaurant. After two frantic weeks, using Government help to obtain futons, scarce in war-devastated Tokyo, Mr. Suzuki had turned the restaurant into a brothel with 30 women supplied by the Government.

The charge to the soldier (only Americans were admitted) was the equivalent of eight cents, and that included a bottle of beer. Half the take went to the woman and half to the house.

"The Americans didn't know this was a Government operation," Mr. Suzuki said. "That was a secret."

The 50th anniversary of the beginning of the American occupation has stimulated renewed interest in that chapter of Japanese history, and a television program has raised awareness and eyebrows with its fictionalized version of the life of Japan's own wartime prostitutes.

Internal documents of the front organization, the Recreation and Amusement Association, show that 55,000 women served in it. The figure includes some office workers, but the great majority worked as prostitutes.

"This really was necessary at the time, because we didn't know what kind of soldiers would come," said Tsunenori Ono, then a 29-year-old police official detailed to oversee the brothels. "It really seemed crucial to build this sexual dike."

The American military authorities nominally banned prostitution, but made few efforts to enforce the ban. The Americans became agitated only when venereal disease rates soared, leading them to declare the Recreation Association brothels off-limits in March 1946.

As a result, the association decided to close down. Other brothels, privately owned, did a booming business, but the Japanese Government's role as a procurer ended after seven months.

In the last few years the world has learned a bit about the Korean, Chinese and even Dutch "comfort women" who were forced to provide sex for the Japanese Army abroad. Yet the Japanese Government's efforts to gather Japanese prostitutes on behalf of American soldiers is much less known.

There is, of course, an enormous difference in that the overseas "comfort women" were mostly Korean teen-agers who were dragged away from their homes and forced into front-line brothels. The Japanese women mostly volunteered, albeit out of economic desperation, and they were paid several times the going rate in ordinary brothels.

Especially at the beginning, the Japanese women were primarily working prostitutes. Later, war widows and other women signed up because they had no other way to feed their families.

To read the yellowing internal documents of the Recreation Association is to peek through a window into a different time. Japan was then not only traumatized by defeat but also terrified at the prospect of the arrival of American troops.

Many families sent young women to the countryside, and one neighborhood association even distributed potassium cyanide capsules with the recommendation that women kill themselves rather than risk disgrace at the hands of savages. Government officials emphasized that the brothels were the best way to "protect the purity of Japanese blood," and they were particularly worried about what they saw as defilement by black American soldiers.

The Recreation Association officially was launched on Aug. 28, 1945, two weeks after the Japanese surrender. Its officials gathered in front of the Imperial Palace and swore an oath acknowledging that "this project is a cornerstone in protecting the chastity of Japanese women." The association's internal documents, gathered by a Japanese writer named Akira Murase, who has written a book about the brothels, refer to the prostitutes as "Okichi."

It is a term laden with sacrifice and sadness, for Okichi was a 16-year-old girl sent by the authorities in 1857 to be the mistress of the first American consul in Japan. Okichi was reviled by Japanese for her intimacy with an American, and so in despair she drowned herself.

Although in 1945 the Government was worried that Japanese prostitutes would not want to stoop so low as to have sex with "satans and savages," economic circumstances were so desperate that many applied. And despite Okichi's misfortunes, apparently the women were not scorned more than other prostitutes.

"They were even envied a bit by ordinary people, because they could earn lots of money," said Mr. Ono, the former police official, whose salary then was equivalent to 46 cents a month. "People were obsessed not with race but with how to make a living."

The first "comfort station," the Komachien, a huge wooden traditional building in a Tokyo suburb, opened with 150 kimono-clad women. One woman had 47 American customers the first day, thereby earning almost $2 for herself.

The prostitutes, who then ranged mostly between 18 and 25, have long since disappeared. They apparently mostly left Tokyo by the 1950's, never spoke of what they had done, and in many cases died early of the effects of venereal disease or other ailments.

The Government role in setting up brothels was less surprising in Japan than it would be in the United States, in that until 1958 Japan permitted prostitution in officially permitted and defined red-light districts.

Despite their theoretical ban on prostitution, the American military authorities in at least one area apparently asked the Government to set up a brothel.

"A month after the troops landed, an American general came to me and said, 'I need your help,' " remembered Yasuhiro Komatsu, then a 25-year-old liaison officer between the American and Japanese forces in the city of Moji. Mr. Komatsu says that the American general demanded that Japan set up a brothel for his men.

As it happened, the Japanese Navy had been running a brothel in one of its buildings in Moji for its own servicemen until the end of the war. So Mr. Komatsu asked the women if they would be willing to have sex with Americans.

"They said, "We're scared of the Americans,' " Mr. Komatsu recalled. "But they also said, 'We have no other job so we'll do it.' "

So the brothel quickly opened, charging much less than the Tokyo rates. Americans lined up, leaving their shoes at the door, and paying just over a penny per visit.

In a few cases, the authorities may have forced Japanese women to work in the brothels. One Japanese book asserts that female factory workers in the city of Kawasaki were trucked to a brothel for Americans and given a speech by a man who said he was from the Interior Ministry.

"You should be proud to be given this mission," he reportedly told the women, who had been told only that they would work in the tourism business. When one woman tried to escape, she is said to have been beaten and her right eye gouged out.

In another case, a women's corps affiliated with the army in Saitama Prefecture is said to have received an order on Sept. 9, 1945, dispatching the members to four brothels in Tokyo. The order, from the Interior Ministry, reportedly said: "You should bear the unbearable and be a shield for all Japanese women."

The Recreation Association followed Japanese tradition by setting up separate brothels for American officers, so they would not have to share women with enlisted men, but some officers declined to take part.

In Nagasaki, seven prostitutes complained formally to the American commander, Lieut. Col. Victor Delnore, that they should not have to pay an "entertainment tax," since they did not find their work entertaining. Colonel Delnore mentioned the issue to the Finance Ministry, and it granted a tax abatement to the brothel.

When the grateful prostitutes then presented Colonel Delnore with free passes, he declined them.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Fearing G.I. Occupiers, Japan Urgesd Women Into Brothels. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe